Discovering Lucky Trimmer means getting ready for a roller­coaster ride through contemporary dance and performance culture: fast, open minded, embracing a wide diversity of styles – and always ready to dare an experiment. Time to look forward to the upcoming 17th production. And to welcome the Luckies on artoporta.

The 17th production in just nine years of existence illustrates the exuberant energy of the entire team. And this dedication pays off, establishing Lucky Trimmer as an widely acclaimed festival. The most recent call for applications attracted almost 300 choreographers from all over the world. A tough job to choose from such a sparkling pool of entries.

After years of nomadic performances in venues like Tacheles, Volksbühne or Maxim Gorki Theatre, the Festival has now found a new home in Berlin’s renowned fringe theatre Sophiensæle. If you are curious, open to choreographic surprises and happen to be in the area: do not miss out on LUCKY TRIMMER #17 at Sophiensæle Berlin – Premiere on April 6th, two further performances on April 7th.

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In our January post, we introduced PODIUM – Young European Music Festival Esslingen to you. For three years, young people from various academic and professional backgrounds have been working on developing a new, contemporary performance culture. They have been working on conceiving new concert formats and communication strategies, while leaving untouched what is always the central focus: the musical work of art. In the following guest article, Katharina from PODIUM describes this year’s festival program.

This year – from 13th to 21st April – we are going to present our most ambitious program so far with fifteen concerts in seven days with fifty excellent young musicians from all over Europe. We present concerts all over the town of Esslingen am Neckar from the club to the historical town hall, from a concert on gym balls to a classical brunch. Often also including other art forms and synthesizing classical music with poetry, dance and new social-aesthetic frameworks.

The festival starts with an opening concert which is everything but a usual opening concert! It is a story which only music can tell. The musical suspense is interwoven and flanked by poems and texts create a gripping dramatic composition that reveals musical poetry of the last 130 years. In the end one discovers that after everything is said, Johann Sebastian Bach still has an infinite amount to say.

One of this year’s highlights is the cooperation with the Bundesjugendballett (German National Youth Ballet). The ensemble’s own choreographies to Schubert and that of the young extraordinary dancer and choreographer Sasha Riva lend the live music a new dimension of expression.

The concert “Erlebtes Leben” (Life Experienced) describes the chronological stages in a human life in abstract musical form. But this concert is also a great deal more: Texts will be inserted to all life phases, banners hung up, performative interventions provided and projected on a dozen monitors throughout the room. Some of the contents will have been collected through worldwide crowdsourcing over all kinds of different channels, making this concert a multicultural flood of personal impressions on the stages of human life. To be part of this project send your own memories, photos or texts to post@podiumfestival.de or post it on facebook. Find more information on our News Blog.

Already last year a huge success, PODIUM.360° is more than a concert, but also much more than an ordinary club evening. Everything is of the best: great music from three centuries, an additional live visuals installation and the prominent DJ and producer Stefan Goldmann (Berghain Berlin), who combines the live acts with demanding electronic music.

The monumental conclusion of PODIUM 2012 will take place in the fascinatingly lit up Frauenkirche, with Mahler’s “The Song of the Earth” and a specially-composed work played by musicians distributed throughout the church.

We’re looking forward to seeing you at PODIUM 2012 in Esslingen from 13th to 21st April!

Good news: it is now possible to present your theatres, venues, festivals, universities and much more on artoporta with our new institution profile. Connect with your partners, feature your artists, engage your audience, present your work.

Illustrate your activities with image galleries, audio samples and videos. Publish your events and performances, including detailed information and links to online ticket services. Feature your artists – and allow visitors to discover great artists via institutions, and great institutions via individual artists. Provide essential information on your institution, that will be fully indexed for an intelligent platform-wide search engine. And this is only the beginning, additional great features and extensions are underway.

Visit the profile of our friends and early adopters from the wonderful PODIUM Young European Music Festival Esslingen for first impressions. And stay tuned for tomorrow’s guest article featuring the upcoming festival from 13th to 21st April – right here on this blog.

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Cultivating connections: On artoporta, it is now neat, clean and simple to share your content and connect to all your activities and projects out there – blogs, websites, social media, web profiles and much more. Update your artoporta profiles now!

Simply log in to your account and scroll down your profile. You will discover a new element called “Web Profiles”. Just paste the URLs to all the profiles you would like to feature on artoporta into the edit form and click save. That’s it.